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Chef to be acquired by Progress

blog.chef.io

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Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#111

Post by RichardCA »

oasisbob wrote: post #67
PixyMisa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My job for years was developing and supporting Progress applications mainly on AIX. So much less crap to deal with than is common today. Things actually worked .

My experience with AIX as a sysadmin ca 2005 was dramatically different. Things "worked", but everything was OLD. CLI tools had bugs and warts that GNU figured out decades previously. I remember having to use obnoxious workarounds when tooling broke because 'find' wouldn't even work properly once you exceeded a certain number of files. (Several thousand, IIRC) And that curses-based wrapper for doing administration ta…

Getting Bash and the other GNU tools to run on AIX 3.2.5 was definitely a chore but I still miss those days.

The culture was a lot more active in the 90's. I mean if you were trying to port something to AIX and having trouble with gcc, you could go on comp.unix.aix and IBM employees would actually respond and be helpful.

We lost a lot when that era died.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#112

Post by chromedev »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #78
user5994461 wrote: post #55

My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible. While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away fro…

While I'm not a proper sysadmin, Ansible is what I gravitated towards (and use for my own projects) and always seemed like the best choice out of Chef, Puppet, and Saltstack. Ansible is/was straight forward to use and understand, very F/OSS, relatively easy to orchestrate (even without tower), and had a nice ecosystem. Ansible always won for me because it was simple, and had just enough (though I always felt that the…

I was anti-HCL/Terraform for a long time due to issues with state files, but lately I honestly prefer it over Ansible whenever possible.. although I'm still not happy with the way cloud-init works on various cloud providers.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#113

Post by xorcist »

fooqux wrote: post #109
xorcist wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the argument here is. Different builds for prod, qa and test? Even if that was workable, which is a question in itself, there is still configuration outside the packaged application. AWS keys, metrics and logs, dashboards, that sort of things.

Well, the container manifest (or whatever you call it) is checked into version control. How you choose to deploy that is up to you, but a ton of CICD tools out there are made for just that purpose. Likewise, how you separate config data and deploy to production is an age old problem with many solutions as well. Sure, Puppet can even be a solution here, but you're just kicking the can down the road. How do you separat…

It is absolutely workable to write a script to bundle data with your application. And one that exports configuration data from your data store to configure your cloud provider. And one for your monitoring system. That's where we all started.

Should you at some time replace all this with a common data format, then congratulations you have invented a configuration management system very similar to Chef.

The use of a version control system or a CI/CD system does not somehow negate the need to keep configuration, neither does a configuration management system do the job of the former. Nobody builds their software using Puppet, they use something like Jenkins. In fact, I would consider having VCS and CI/CD in place a prerequisite to any type of configuration management.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#114

Post by chucky_z »

geerlingguy wrote: post #83
TinyRick wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it's "long dead". Keep in mind that Chef (the company) has several different products too...Chef Infra (traditional configuration management) has fallen out of favor and Ansible seems to be the popular choice these days, but there are still a lot of big Chef Infra shops (e.g. Facebook [0]) that have invested heavily into configuring their environments using Chef Infra, which would require a good bit o…

The fact that I've never heard of Habitat or InSpec means either they're extremely niche and not as popular as I think Chef would've hoped, or I'm completely out of touch with both app packaging and sec tooling. I'm hoping it's the former, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the latter since the 'enterprise' ecosystem of cloud tooling has grown exponentially in the past decade.

InSpec is really a good tool you should know. I believe you can write molecule tests with it so it’s something you may have already used at this point and not realized it.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#115

Post by mianos »

user5994461 wrote: post #55

My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible. While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away fro…

Having used both. If I look around I see Chef used less and less and Ansible more and more but that does not mean there is a valid path from Chef to Ansible when you way more than a trivial number of hosts. I'd say go from Chef to Saltstack. If you only have a few hosts, sure Ansible.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#116

Post by bpodgursky »

nunez wrote: post #73

Chef was acquired for $220M cash. According to Crunchbase, Chef raised $105M total up to a Series E. Investors aside, did anyone make money here? Either way, I’m glad that they are continuing to exist. Chef was onto something with Habitat and (especially) InSpec.

I don't think the investors (at least the later ones) made meaningful money at that kind of acquisition price.

Founded in 2008, that's 105M for some fraction (maybe a majority) of the equity... minus fees / taxes / legal costs, that's a pretty lousy investment, especially compared to market returns over this timeframe.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#117

Post by notyourday »

carlosf wrote: post #93
geerlingguy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that I've never heard of Habitat or InSpec means either they're extremely niche and not as popular as I think Chef would've hoped, or I'm completely out of touch with both app packaging and sec tooling. I'm hoping it's the former, but I wouldn't be too surprised if the latter since the 'enterprise' ecosystem of cloud tooling has grown exponentially in the past decade.

You're not out of touch, Terraform + Containers + People realizing that building immutable things is much better than managing state pretty much killed Chef and Puppet.

People love talking about their state being immutable when in 99.9% of the cases it is not.

Here's a simple test: if your runtime container infrastructure is immutable, you should be able to run your container with a file system being read-only. If you cannot do that, then you do not have an immutable infrastructure and hence you will need need something to manage the state. Ignoring it is akin to kicking housekeeping tasks to some point in future and hoping that before you get buried under the multi-year backlog of tiny corner cases before your entire product is replaced with something else.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#118

Post by miah_ »

user5994461 wrote: post #98
carlosf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not out of touch, Terraform + Containers + People realizing that building immutable things is much better than managing state pretty much killed Chef and Puppet.

People still have to manage quite a bit of setup for kubernetes/containers though... and that configuration usually happens with ansible, not chef. I think it's fair to say that Chef has failed to hold their market.

Consider that Chef Infra has 2 core developers and its not surprising why.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#119

Post by rmoriz »

swalberg wrote: post #103
user5994461 wrote: post #55

My 2 cents on Chef is that's it's long dead. The handful of people I know who used chef professionally all gave strong negative feedback about it and moved away to ansible. While I can't comment on the exact problems because I didn't use it personally, there was a recurring mentions of losing states, seemingly destroying systems and configurations instead of setting things up. People were adamant that moving away fro…

I brought Chef into the online side of the NFL several years ago. We still use it, though less and less as we get more things into containers. I've got my gripes with it, but I'd never second guess my decision to use Chef, or trade it for anything else. Those problems sound like people aren't taking the same care in their cookbooks that they are in their regular software. If you write bad cookbooks and don't at least…

I'm using Chef since 2010 for myself and customers. I never understood the hate but I saw so many developers not getting it and/or overengineering it to a state which was beyond their capability to debug.

For example the different levels of attribute types. I saw "senior" developers writing nasty Ruby code (actually `system("rm -rf directory")` to delete directories (outside the chef DSL) because they didn't understand the appropriate chef resource.

The market decided to take away the power of a real programming language DSL as an interface. People are now forced to deal with terraform (HCL), YAML or JSON. It's a lobotomy.

Re: Chef to be acquired by Progress

#120

Post by twunde »

rmoriz wrote: post #119
swalberg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I brought Chef into the online side of the NFL several years ago. We still use it, though less and less as we get more things into containers. I've got my gripes with it, but I'd never second guess my decision to use Chef, or trade it for anything else. Those problems sound like people aren't taking the same care in their cookbooks that they are in their regular software. If you write bad cookbooks and don't at least…

I'm using Chef since 2010 for myself and customers. I never understood the hate but I saw so many developers not getting it and/or overengineering it to a state which was beyond their capability to debug. For example the different levels of attribute types. I saw "senior" developers writing nasty Ruby code (actually `system("rm -rf directory")` to delete directories (outside the chef DSL) because they didn't understa…

`The market decided to take away the power of a real programming language DSL as an interface. People are now forced to deal with terraform (HCL), YAML or JSON. It's a lobotomy` I feel this so much. Granted HCL is taking steps to become closer to a real language but its frustrating that some of the features that I used to take for granted are missing (why do we have ternary if statements in HCL but not real if-else blocks. I used to enforce a rule that you should not have nested ternaries, but now that's the only way to do if else if statements)
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